This is the first installment of a new occasional segment we like to call Beats and Beets: stories about food and music. The Flagstaff band Enormodome kicks it off. They’re a two-man band like no two-man band you’ve ever heard before. KNAU’s Ryan Heinsius brings us this profile.
Listen to this music and you might think it’s a four or five person rock band. But this is just one guitarist, one drummer and they call themselves Enormodome, a popular Flagstaff based band. Drummer Mikey Seitz and guitarist Jeff Lusby sat down with me in the KNAU studios. They have a brotherly connection, and even finish each other’s sentences.
Mikey Seitz: We’d been in these parallel sister bands for years and hung out a lot socially.
Jeff Lusby: Shared a rehearsal space and whatnot as well.
Seitz: Yeah, and I brought it up, “Dude, we’ve never played music. What’s the deal with that?” So it went from zero to, like, strapping on the guitar …
Lusby: Sitting behind the kit, yeah.
Seitz: … you know, wailing away. And I think that first day, we wrote “I’m Gonna Love You” in a total of six hours from nothing to a fully tracked, taped version.
Lusby: It was fast because we didn’t have to worry about it not being great or good, even. If you’re not thinking, “This has to be amazing!” when you’re writing something, then it’s way more visceral and it’s way more natural and we end of liking these songs more than songs we sweat over and bleed over. Well, before it was like, “Well, I wrote that. I really like that guitar part. I can’t imagine just scrapping it.” And now I’m just like, “Scrap it!”
Seitz: And then on this record, the newest record, we were set up to record in the living room and we were going down to rehearse something else and he just starts playing this thing. And I just sat down behind the drums and …
Lusby: Started playing.
Seitz: … this simple straight ahead pop-groove thing and three hours later that song existed: "I’m Alive."
Seitz: I was the kid in junior high who would get in trouble so much for drumming on my desk—just subconsciously. Just you know, making racket; as a 10-year-old built drums out of trash cans with ratchet straps and I got some cellophane plastic wrap and put it around and cranked it tight like it was a drum head and whistling and snapping all the time.
Lusby: This is not—it wasn’t just junior high.
Seitz: No, it started then! I’m saying it started then. And it’s constant.
Lusby: The rule is: If it’s not fun we do not do it. And we made that up right away, right off the bat. And because it’s just the two of us, everything moves faster. I don’t know, it’s just the nature of it. You have two personalities, two schedules. The only thing that sucks, is that we only have two wallets. And that comes up sometimes, you know.
